Early this morning I happened to be reading Steven Millhauser's new
story in the Jan. 3 New Yorker, "Getting Closer," and I came
upon what first looked like coincidence, and soon emerged as a very
likely instance of Nabokov bubbling up from Millhauser's memories.
Within the space of one allusively dense paragraph, we read of "the
monkey cage at Beardsley Park Zoo" in Connecticut [a real place!],
Pike's Peak, and Huck Finn. The paragraph also mentions "the whaling
ship at Mystic Seaport"--the William S. Burroughs--which coincidentally
was mentioned to me by someone else about a month ago, and
which--according to the web site-- was bing built in New Bedford when
Herman Melville departed that city on his whaling adventure. What's
more, the whole paragraph is built as a reference
to Saul Steinberg's "The World as Seen From 9th Ave.", the New
Yorker's cover of March 29, 1976--a humorous anticipatory reference
to the hoped-for place of publication?
The story expands (in the characteristic Millhauser way) upon the kind
of
anticipatory nostalgia seen in Nabokov's "A guide to Berlin" and in
chapter one of The Gift--and also in some ways in parts of Speak,
Memory.
In a variation on Nabokov's phrase from Speak, Memory (p. 77),
the story's last paragraph asserts (reporting the thoughts of the
story's hero): "Things will stop and no one will ever die."
Whether conscious, unconscious, or coincidental--a marvelous story.
Stephen Blackwell